There are many connections between the events of 9/11 and Oklahoma City. Some of these connections revolve around the alleged 9/11 hijackers, the “20th hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui, and a couple of airports around Oklahoma City. Looking closer at the airport connections reveals startling coincidences with regard to the people who ran World Trade Center (WTC) security company Stratesec, as well as CIA Director George Tenet’s mentor, David Boren, who is currently the co-chairman of President Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board.

Independent investigators have shown that there are striking links between the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City (OKC) and the events of 9/11.[1, 2] Recently, many 9/11 investigators have become more interested in learning the truth about the OKC bombing after being exposed to the excellent film A Noble Lie.[3]

The OKC investigations have revealed eyewitnesses accounts of the sighting in Oklahoma of Mohamed Atta and five other 9/11 hijacker suspects.[4] Last year, an article in the Oklahoma Gazette confirmed that records show Atta, Marwan Al-Shehhi, Nawaf Al-Hazmi and Zacarias Moussaoui all “either visited or lived in Oklahoma from July 2000 to August 2001.”[5]

Between February and August of 2001, Zacarias Moussaoui lived in Norman, Oklahoma and attended Airman Flight School at Max Westheimer Airport, which is owned and operated by the University of Oklahoma. Moussaoui even lived in a university dormitory. According to Moussaoui’s indictment, Atta and Al-Shehhi had visited the same flight school in July, 2000, but did not take classes there.

Westheimer Aiport is just three miles northwest of Norman and was originally a U.S. Navy flight training field. A squadron of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), a federally supported, non-profit corporation that serves as the official civilian auxiliary of the U. S. Air Force, still gathers at Westheimer every week.[6] Coincidentally, several of the alleged 9/11 hijackers rented apartments in Delray Beach, Florida from a member of CAP. One of the apartments was said to be “a meeting ground for terrorists.” The CAP member landlord, Mike Irish, turned out to be the first intended victim of the October 2001 anthrax attacks. One of his employees actually died from the anthrax.[7]

In 2005, Airman Flight School shut down due to its inability to pay rent and the university newspaper revealed the name of the company that had leased the building. “The airport building is owned by the University of Oklahoma. A Cleveland County District Court order had granted possession of the building to the current landlord, Baker Hughes, Inc., of Houston, which leases the building from OU.” Baker Hughes is an oil services company that is among an elite few making a killing off of the Iraq War.[8]

Dale Davis, the vice president of Airman Flight School, said FBI agents showed up at the facility asking questions about Moussaoui and had been there before. “Davis said FBI agents had visited his school just two years earlier to inquire about Ihab Ali Nawawi, who took flight training there in 1993 and was later charged in connection with the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Africa, which were blamed on bin Laden’s group. Davis also confirmed that Atta and another suspected hijacker, Marwan al-Shehhi, visited Airman Flight School, staying overnight at the school’s dormitory in the nearby Sooner Inn, before deciding to train at another facility.”[9]

Weeks after 9/11, however, FBI Director Robert Mueller repeated his false assertion that federal authorities had no idea that terrorists were using U.S. flight schools to train for piloting commercial airliners. ”There were no warning signs that I’m aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country,” he said.[10] Apparently he had forgotten about the famous July 2001 Phoenix memo and several other related warnings focused on that exact risk.[11]

Established in 1989, Airman Flight School was owned by Jerry Carroll and Brenda Keene. Apparently Carroll and Keene bilked a number of their students out of their life savings as the flight school was going under. But the service was very good in some cases, considering that — “Flight instructor Juan Carlos [Merida] picked up Moussaoui at Will Rogers World Airport when he came to Oklahoma and took him back to the airport when he left.”[12]

Airman’s students sued Carroll and Keene when the business collapsed, along with KJB Flight Management, an entity of which Keene and David Batton were principals. KJB had tried to buy Airman and was managing the school until it closed.[13] David Batton was, at one time, the Cleveland County Assistant District Attorney. The Panamanian Juan Carlos Merida, who had picked up and dropped off Moussaoui from the airport, was later represented by Batton in legal proceedings related to suspicion of terrorism.[14]

Wiley Post and Hangar 8

According to FBI summary documents, Mohamed Atta was also spotted at nearby Wiley Post Airport in Bethany, Oklahoma within six months of the 9/11 attacks. An employee at private aviation company Million Air witnessed Atta flying at Wiley Post Airport along with two other alleged 9/11 hijackers, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Waleed Al-Shehri.[15] Other FBI summary documents indicate that Saeeed Al-Ghamdi was also seen flying in to Wiley Post Airport on an unspecified date and that Hani Hanjour had made inquiries to a company in The Netherlands that ran a flight school out of Wiley Post Airport.[16]

The suburb of Bethany is just seven miles west of Oklahoma City and a little over 20 miles from Norman. Wiley Post, located in Bethany, is one of three airports owned and operated by the Oklahoma City Department of Airports. Westheimer Airport in Norman, run by the university, provides a fourth option for public airport access.

Hangar 8 of Wiley Post Airport was, until 2005, the home of Aviation General, the aircraft company owned by Kuwaiti-American Corporation (KuwAm) and run by Wirt Dexter Walker III. KuwAm and its WTC security company Stratesec had strong connections to the Kuwaiti royal family, which benefited from 9/11 through the ouster of Saddam Hussein. The companies were also strongly linked to the Bush family network and to people who came from deep-state U.S. intelligence backgrounds.[17] Like his fellow KuwAm director Robert Dudley van Roijen, Walker is the son of a CIA officer. He is also a suspect in 9/11 insider trading.[18]

Aviation General was the parent of two wholly-owned subsidiaries: Commander Aircraft Company, which manufactured Commander-brand aircraft, and Strategic Jet Services, which provided aircraft brokerage and refurbishment services. Aviation General, Commander Aircraft, and Strategic Jet Services were all located in Hangar 8 of Wiley Post Airport.

Wiley Post Airport has approximately 24 hangars and Hangar 8 is set off away from the rest.[19] Although Aviation General and its subsidiaries all went bankrupt or were sold off in the few years after 9/11, Hangar 8 still houses three businesses. These include Jim Clark & Associates, Valair Aviation, and Oklahoma Aviation.

Jim Clark & Associates is an aircraft sales and brokerage firm, similar to Strategic Jet Services, and is located in Hangar 8. The company shared a phone number (405-787-6222) with another aircraft company called Sundancer Enterprises, out of Norman, OK.

Valair Aviation is an aircraft service company also located in Hangar 8. This is a service center that works on Commander-brand aircraft, the kind that Wirt Walker’s Commander Aircraft Company had manufactured there. Valair started as a division of Aero Commander, which was a subsidiary of Rockwell International and Gulfstream. By the year 2000, Valair (called the Service Center) had also become specialized in servicing Raytheon aircraft.

At first glance, the most interesting of these new Hangar 8 companies is the flight school called Oklahoma Aviation. This is due to an incredible coincidence regarding the young man who now runs the company, Shohaib Nazir Kassam.

Oklahoma Aviation first appeared on the internet in March, 2001 although the website was only one page with the company name for the first year. The company was officially founded in February 2004 by Tom Kilpatrick, the son of famous Oklahoman John Kilpatrick Jr., who had been president of the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce.

Tom Kilpatrick didn’t know anything about aviation, so he hired Shoiam Kassam to be the Chief Flight Instructor and Rob Rothman as Assistant Chief Flight Instructor. Rothman was a recent graduate of the University of Oklahoma and member of the Civil Air Patrol. Rothman is now an officer in the U.S. Air Force stationed in Pensacola, Florida. The Air Force base is located at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola which, coincidentally, was the address used by several alleged 9/11 hijackers on their driver’s licenses.[20]

In March 2007, Oklahoma Aviation was purchased by another famous son of Oklahoma, Clayton Healey. Clay had just come off the ranch as a cowboy in 2003 and started AIC Title Service, which focused on aircraft company closures. Clay’s father was Skip Healey, a well known Republican National Committee member and oil company executive. The Healey’s were grandnephews of Lew Wentz, who had opened Oklahoma up to the oil industry.

By 2008, Oklahoma Aviation had the best airplanes around.[21] And somehow young Shoaib Kassam came to be listed as the owner of the company.[22] The Chief Flight Instructor today is Marcus Buchanan, who in 1998 was a student at the Airline Training Academy (ATA) in Orlando, Florida. This is the same ATA that went bankrupt while robbing its students and was then found to have financial connections to Wally Hilliard, who owned Huffman Aviation, where Atta and friends went after deciding not to train in Oklahoma.[23] Buchanan went from ATA to be a flight instructor at the University of Oklahoma’s Department of Aviation before moving to his current job in Hangar 8.

The part of this story that seems more incredible is that Kassam was, in March 2006, a government witness against Zacarias Moussaoui. He was actually Moussaoui’s flight instructor. To emphasize, the guy who is now occupying Wirt Walker’s offices in Hangar 8 at Wiley Post Airport not only knew Zacarias Moussaoui, he was the primary flight instructor of the “20th hijacker” at Airman Flight School.

Kassam moved to Norman in 1998, at the age of 18, coming from Mombassa, Kenya. He was originally from Pakistan. Two years after he arrived in Norman, he completed his training to become a flight instructor. He was only 21 years of age when he spent 57 hours (unsuccessfully) trying to train Zacarias Moussaoui to fly.

During his testimony and cross-examination in the Moussaoui trial, Kassam was asked many times about Moussaoui’s religion. Both the prosecutor and the defense attorney were very interested in whether Moussaoui was a devout Muslim. After repeated questioning, Kassam said that yes, he thought that Moussaoui considered himself a Muslim.

“Q. And you mentioned that he was trying to get you back into the faith?

A. No. He just talked about, you know, church, I mean, sorry, mosques and going to pray and fasting, and just things like that.”[24]

There seemed to be some confusion on this issue in the courtroom. But Kassam was useful to the prosecution in that he confirmed that Moussaoui also called himself Zuluman Tangotango. This allowed prosecutors to introduce a mountain of emails from the address “pilotz123@hotmail,” purportedly belonging to Zuluman Tangtango. The email evidence played a significant role in Moussaoui’s conviction.

Kassam also remembered seeing Atta and Al-Shehhi at Airman. A student at the time of Atta and Alshehhi’s visit, Kassam recalled bumping into them when they were being given a tour of the Airman facility.

The history of Aviation General was, like that of Stratesec and the other companies that Wirt Walker ran, a record of well-financed business failure. As of 1998, Aviation General was losing millions of dollars every year. With very humble positive returns, the year 2000 results were the best in the company’s history, according to Walker.

In September 2000, John DeHavilland of British Aerocraft joined as CEO of Strategic Jet Services. Three months later, Walker’s president at Aviation General, Dean N. Thomas, died suddenly at a young age.[25] And by August 2001, Aviation General was reporting million-dollar losses again.

In late 2002, Strategic Jet Services “discontinued its operations and began the process of dissolving the company.”[26] Commander Aircraft Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy at the same time, and that was changed to Chapter 7 in January 2005. Commander Aircraft left Oklahoma in September 2005 to move to an “undisclosed location.” In an odd shell game reminiscent of the Stratesec dealings, what was left of Aviation General was sold to Tiger Aircraft, a small company with Taiwanese investors that went bankrupt in 2006.

Oklahoma Aviation was a flight school that was just getting off the ground in 2005, as it took over Hangar 8 from Aviation General and soon had the best planes. This was the opposite of the apparent financial fortunes of the Aviation General companies that all went belly up that year. And it was also unlike Airman Flight School which, although it was in the same area and same business as Oklahoma Aviation, shut down in 2005 because it could not pay the rent.

Editor’s note: This project, based on interviews with dozens of current and former national security officials, intelligence analysts and others, examines evolving U.S. counterterrorism policies and the practice of targeted killing. This is the first of three stories.

Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the “disposition matrix.”

The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. U.S. officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the “disposition” of suspects beyond the reach of American drones.

Although the matrix is a work in progress, the effort to create it reflects a reality setting in among the nation’s counterterrorism ranks: The United States’ conventional wars are winding down, but the government expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years.

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaeda continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight.

“We can’t possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us,” a senior administration official said. “It’s a necessary part of what we do. . . . We’re not going to wind up in 10 years in a world of everybody holding hands and saying, ‘We love America.’ ”

That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism. Targeting lists that were regarded as finite emergency measures after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are now fixtures of the national security apparatus. The rosters expand and contract with the pace of drone strikes but never go to zero.

WASHINGTON — More than 50,000 Americans have been combat-wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan since 2001, a grim measure of the cost of more than a decade of war.

According to Defense Department accounting, the number of wounded reached 50,010 on Thursday.

The names of the wounded are not released. Unlike those killed in combat, whose names are released and whose remains are brought home in sober, white-glove ceremony, those who are wounded are flown home on medical evacuation aircraft and carried off on stretchers in anonymity.

Among the wounded are some 16,000 severely injured, casualties who would have died on the battlefield just a generation ago. But new medical procedures, protective gear such as body armor and faster medical evacuation are saving more than 90 percent of all those who fall in battle.

According to the U.S. Army surgeon general’s office, military surgeons have performed 1,653 major limb amputations since 2001.

Scrambling to answer yesterday’s report from The Guardian that Britain had rejected an Obama Administration request to use British military bases in an American attack on Iran, Prime Minister David Cameron’s office issued a statement insisting Britain is opposed to such an attack “at this moment.”

That opposition seems to be wafer thin, however, as the statement also said that planning for such a move in the future was ongoing and that talks are “under way” on giving the US such access to their bases.

The British Attorney General’s office had reportedly advised against giving the US access to the bases because an attack would be a violation of international law, and doing so would mean British culpability in the crime.

This might suggest that the “at this moment” comments are just a temporary out, while Britain’s legal team struggles to come up with some sort of conceivably justification for endorsing the American attack.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Thursday questioned whether United Airlines could be held responsible for suspected airport security lapses that allowed hijackers onto the American Airlines plane that slammed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Thursday’s hearing before U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan stems from one of the few remaining lawsuits arising from the hijacked plane attacks, which killed more than 3,000 people in New York, the Pentagon outside Washington, and Pennsylvania.

While most of the cases have settled, Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder of the World Trade Center property, is pursuing negligence claims against United Airlines, now United Continental Holdings Inc, and American Airlines. Silverstein says they should both be held liable for loss of property and business.

Silverstein’s World Trade Center Properties is seeking additional damages beyond what he has already received from his own insurer. The hearing on Thursday dealt only with claims over the destruction of 7 World Trade Center, a building just north of the World Trade Center site that also collapsed in the attacks.

Silverstein argues that United is responsible for suspected security failures that resulted in the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11, which slammed into one of the towers.

Those failures, the court heard on Thursday, began very early in the morning of September 11, 2001, when hijackers Mohammed Atta and Abdul Aziz al Omari set out on their trip.

That morning, Atta and al Omari boarded a US Airways flight from Maine’s Portland International Jetport to Boston. From Logan International Airport, they connected onto Flight 11, which they commandeered and crashed into the World Trade Center.

The “Analysis of Structural Response of WTC 7 to Fire and Sequential Failures Leading to Collapse” (McAllister et al. 2012) published by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) presents a complex procedure used to analyze the structural behavior of Seven World Trade Center (WTC 7) on September 11, 2001.

The authors concluded that the catastrophic global collapse followed local connection and framing failures induced by office fires on several floors. Although the authors included a brief discussion of the relationship between simulation results and observed events, the paper lacks any objective discussion of the practical application or significance of the computational modeling described.

The technical paper published in the Journal of Structural Engineering summarizes, but necessarily condenses, many details found in the National Construction Safety Team Act Reports NCSTAR 1A (Sunder et al. 2008), NCSTAR 1-9 (McAllister et al. 2008) and NCSTAR 1-9A (MacNeill et al. 2008) published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). However, the paper lacks references to public sources of information sufficient to verify the authors’ assumptions and conclusions. For example, structural calculations demonstrating the “walk-off” failure mechanism that hypothetically triggered the progressive collapse are unavailable.

This information was placed off limits in 2009 when the NIST Director determined that release of calculations “might jeopardize public safety” (Gallagher 2009). If released, according to NIST, the calculations “would provide instruction to individuals wanting to learn how to simulate building collapses and how to most effectively destroy large buildings” (Kollar-Kotelly 2011). But the Ethical Standards for ASCE Journals are clear; technical papers are required to include “detail and reference to public sources of information sufficient to permit the author’s peers to repeat the work or otherwise verify its accuracy.” This standard aligns with the engineer’s responsibility for ensuring public safety and has nothing to do with devising ways to destroy buildings.

Although structural calculations demonstrating the “walk-off” failure mechanism are unavailable, many structural design, fabrication and erection drawings of WTC 7 were released by the NIST Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) office and are available for those interested in studying the building’s structural system. A comparison of original construction documents with details of the NIST study raises numerous questions germane to the collapse initiation. This discussion summarizes several of these questions.

Shear Studs and Composite Floor Construction
The discussion of lateral-torsional buckling of beams and girders implies that all interior girders in the building lacked shear studs providing composite action with the concrete floor slab, and the lack of shear studs contributed to collapse initiation and extensive floor-framing failures throughout the structure. McAllister et al. 2008 shows the girder spanning between columns 44 and 79 at floor 13 lacked shear studs, and this agrees with Cantor (1985) structural drawing S-8 revision H. But a previous publication describing the fabrication and construction aspects of the steel structure clearly shows 30 shear studs equally spaced along this girder at typical office floors including floor 13 (Salvarinas 1986). The author, John J. Salvarinas, was the project manager for Frankel Steel Limited (one of the two steel fabricators) during the construction of WTC 7.

The term “anomaly” as used in science means something that contradicts, or at least is not explainable by, a basic theory. Simultaneous anomalies can be “coincidences”, but as they increase in number they may force a scientist to put his or her theory in question. Regarding air defense on 9/11 we can identify at least six major simultaneous anomalies.

1. Absence of command authority
The specific people who should have managed the air defense on 9/11 were absent precisely while the attacks were occuring. Even though they were available in the days before and after the attack, they were missing exactly in the crucial hours of the hijackings. For better understanding, this is what the protocol said before 9/11 in case of a hijacking:

The air traffic controllers realizing the hijacking would inform their superiors, who in turn would alert the Hijack Coordinator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The Hijack Coordinator would call the Pentagon, more precisely the Deputy Director for Operations (DDO) in the National Military Command Center (NMCC). The DDO in coordination with the Secretary of Defense then would give orders to NORAD, which would scramble fighter jets to intercept the hijacked plane. 1

So the top people responsible would be:
 the FAA´s Hijack Coordinator
 the DDO in the NMCC
 the Secretary of Defense

On 9/11 all three were absent from their command posts in the crucial hours between 8:14 a.m. (first hijacking) and 10:03 (last crash).

Michael Canavan, the Hijack Coordinator of the FAA (and former Special Forces General) was not in the office but had flown to Puerto Rico; 2 Lynne Osmus, his Deputy, arrived in the office only after all the planes had crashed 3

General Montague Winfield, the NMCC DDO (who in 2012 became Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense), was not at his post between 8:30 and 10:00 a.m.; Captain Charles Joseph Leidig, his Deputy, had just qualified for being DDO one month before; General Winfield had asked him the afternoon before if he would sit in as DDO from 8:30 on; Winfield returned to his post only after all planes had crashed 4

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stayed away from the NMCC, too, and arrived there no sooner than 10:30 a.m., after all planes had crashed 5

This seemingly well-timed absence of key people is still unexplained It obstructed the air defense effectively.

2. Communication breakdown
Several important telephone and radio connections didn´t work, exactly while the hijackings were in progress. President Bush remembered in his memoir: “One of my greatest frustrations on September 11 was the woeful communications technology on Air Force One.” 6 His attempts to keep in touch with Cheney failed repeatedly. Bush: “We tried to establish an open line, but it kept dropping.” 7

Neither could he reach Rumsfeld nor other key officials. 8 Bush says he became angry, snapping to his Chief of Staff: “What the hell is going on?” According to the President the phone started working again, as Air Force One was reaching Barksdale Air Force Base at about 11:45. 9 In other words, Bush was largely out of the loop for about two hours due to an unexplained temporary communication breakdown.

The same problem was seen in the Pentagon´s NMCC, where the before mentioned Captain Leidig was “having a difficult time” contacting the FAA´s Operations Center. Once the line was established it was “repeatedly lost because of technical problems”, according to an internal document by the 9/11 Commission. 10 Because of this unexplained failure the basic communication between civilian air traffic control and the Pentagon was effectively obstructed while the attacks.

Furthermore the pilots of the F-16s finally taking off from Langley at 9:30 could not be reached by their NORAD supervisors for unknown reasons until after the Pentagon was hit at 9:37. Only at 9:38, a few seconds after the Pentagon crash, could a connection be established to the fighter pilots, who were only then redirected to Washington. 11

How misleading can a “news” article get? Try this headline: “Federal Reserve bombing plot foiled in NYC”. There never was a plot to foil. There never was a plot independent of the FBI to foil. The plot was of the FBI’s own devising and instigation. There never was an ongoing crime for the FBI to detect and stop.

Foil means counteract. To say something is foiled means there has been an action to counter-act. What? Did the FBI counter-act its own action? We should give the FBI credit for devising a plot and then stopping its own plot? We should credit some inept terrorist for threatening to make a touchdown when he couldn’t get beyond the five-yard line without FBI counseling and guidance and without the FBI pointing out the goal line and supplying the football?

The FBI simply terminated a procedure to entrap some naive would-be bomber. The FBI even helped him select his imaginary target. “FBI arrests dupe” is more like it, or “FBI stings dupe”, or “FBI concludes its bombing sting with an arrest”.

A sting operation like this doesn’t foil anything. It SETS UP someone for a fall. It’s an enhanced frame-up done with the FBI-encouraged participation of the person framed. The FBI agents literally become criminals, conspire as criminals, further the planned crime, and create the crime. They should arrest themselves.

The plot makes no sense as a terror plot. It makes sense, however, as both government propaganda and as a smear of those non-violent persons who are pro-free market money and anti-Federal Reserve.

Editor’s Note: 9/11 widow Ellen Mariani, one of the four family members featured in 9/11: Explosive Evidence – Experts Speak Out, has challenged the official story in the U.S. court system for over a decade, and this could be her last chance to get a civil trial for the murder of her husband Louis. She needs to raise $11,000 by November 1 so that her legal team can make its final effort to re-open her lawsuit and present it to the Supreme Court. You can donate to her legal fund and find out more about the case at www.marianilawsuit.com.

Ellen Mariani lost her husband, Louis Neil Mariani, when Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower on 9/11, and she hasn’t given up the fight for justice since that tragic day

Embattled widow Ellen Mariani wants to tell the U.S. Supreme Court that the $3.75 million settlement of her late husband’s 9/11 claims was tainted, and she has authorized a legal defense fund to allow her to carry on her decade-long fight, announced Mariani backers August 30 from Massachusetts.

Mariani was the first person to sue airlines and airports for a 9/11 death–in Chicago federal court in early 2002. She was also one of the earliest family members to speak publicly about her doubts about the official 9/11 story. None of the remains of her husband Louis Neil Mariani, booked as a passenger on United Air Lines Flight 175, were ever returned to her. According to the official 9/11 story, Arab hijackers flew her husband’s plane into the South Tower of the World Trade Center after slipping past airport security with box cutters–but Mariani doesn’t buy it.

At one time Mariani was persuaded to sue George W. Bush and other government officials for complicity in the events of 9/11, but that case was promptly dismissed.

What remained to her–at least until late June 2012–was the chance to get evidence and accountability inside the official 9/11 wrongful death litigation that was assigned by Congress to a single federal court, the Southern District of New York, and a single judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein. No claim in that case ever reached trial, and Mariani’s is the last to be paid.

“ Mariani was the first person to sue airlines and airports for a 9/11 death — in Chicago federal court in early 2002. She was also one of the earliest family members to speak publicly about her doubts about the official 9/11 story. ”

Judge Hellerstein has presided over hundreds of cases involving 9/11 victims in Manhattan, and all have resulted in settlements for undisclosed amounts. Hellerstein took an active role in urging settlement, stating at one point, “Money is the universal lubricant.”

Meanwhile, Mariani and her attorney Bruce Leichty have been repeatedly rebuffed by Hellerstein, say Mariani’s backers, and have now been rebuked by a two-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. They were “ordered to show cause” why they should not pay money sanctions to their adversaries after they submitted extensive documentation of Hellerstein’s connections with three key defendants in the 9/11 litigation, Boeing Corporation and security companies ICTS and its U.S. subsidiary Huntleigh. In an April 2012 motion, submitted on the eve of appellate argument, Mariani showed that Hellerstein’s son Joseph, a lawyer in Israel, had client relationships with affiliates and joint ventures of these same three defendants.

That was on top of her earlier showing to Hellerstein that the plaintiff who took over her New York federal court claims in 2004, John Ransmeier, was then representing United Air Lines at the same time he was purporting to settle the Mariani 9/11 claims with United and Huntleigh and their insurers, notes James Phillips, a retired attorney and a former Marine Corps officer. Phillips is a long-time 9/11 truth advocate who is not involved in the case.

“These filings were controversial but quite relevant and well-presented,” said Phillips. “One of Ellen’s main interests has been about getting beyond the stage-managing of the 9/11 proceedings, about getting behind the superficial appearance that the 9/11 legal process is working in the public interest, but that’s obviously not possible when a court is turning a blind eye to conflicts of interest.”

The Supreme Court is now her only hope for 9/11 truth, he says, but “she and her litigation team have exhausted their resources and can’t go to the Supreme Court without help.”

Phillips says he has long been interested in the case based on his acquaintance with some of Mariani’s backers, who have followed proceedings in her probate court case in New Hampshire where the Estate of Louis Neil Mariani was opened after 9/11, and subsequently hearings in New York, where Mariani’s case was transferred from federal court in Chicago. Ellen Mariani was the first administrator of her deceased husband’s estate, but was essentially forced out in favor of a supposedly neutral successor based on complaints of attorneys for her step daughter and based on dubious counsel of prior New Hampshire counsel after Ellen began her quest for 9/11 truth.

Mariani argued in her latest filing that she should be permitted to re-enter her case as an intervener based on the divided loyalties of her fiduciary, and also to challenge Ransmeier’s settlement since it directly affected her. Her court papers reveal that she didn’t discover that John Ransmeier was not a neutral fiduciary until after a previous attempt to intervene in 2007.

The papers reveal that Ransmeier was proposing to settle the case without any accountability, and without honoring her personal spousal loss claim, even though Ransmeier’s law firm had been representing United Air Lines and other interested parties without disclosure during the same time he was litigating against them and then settling with them.

Hellerstein and the 2nd Circuit both rejected Mariani’s first attempt at intervention, although the 2nd Circuit also confirmed that she could object to any settlement presented to Hellerstein; however, in June 2012 a different two-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit ruled that Mariani should have known she could no longer intervene to challenge the settlement, and threatened to impose money sanctions on her and attorney Leichty (the outcome of that threat is pending at the time of this news release).